Face-Recognition Technology Improves

By BARNABY J. FEDER

Published: March 14, 2003

Facial recognition technology has improved substantially since 2000, according to results released yesterday of a benchmark test by four federal government agencies involving systems from 10 companies.

The data, which is the latest in a series of biannual tests overseen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is expected to encourage government security officers to deploy facial recognition systems in combination with fingerprinting and other biometric systems for applications like verifying that people are who they claim to be and identifying unknown people by comparing them with a database of images.

But the report also highlighted continuing shortcomings, like the poor performance of recognition systems in outdoors settings in which even the best systems made correct matches to the database of images just 50 percent of the time. And it cited outcomes that it said needed more research, like the tendency of the systems to identify men better than women and older subjects better than young ones.

The report was strictly a technical evaluation and did not discuss any of the privacy or civil rights concerns that have stirred opposition to the technology.

Because the results of the different companies are public, the testing is also expected to become a marketing tool for those who did best, including Identix, Cognitec Systems and Eyematic Interfaces. It is expected to be especially helpful to Cognitec, a tiny German company that is not widely known in the United States, and Eyematic, a San Francisco-based company best known for capturing data from traits like facial structures, expressions and gait to create animated entertainment.

``Face recognition had been just a subdiscipline for us,'' said Hartmut Neven, chief technical officer and a founder of Eyematic. He said that domestic security needs had created a marketing opportunity that Eyematic was gearing up to chase.

The results were not as positive for Viisage Technology, which had been among the leaders in 2000. Viisage said that the results, that it identified just 64 percent of the test subjects from a database of 37,437 individuals, were at odds with the strong performance it had been having with big customers, like the State of Illinois. While the government test is the largest for such technology, the number of images in the database was far below the 13 million that Viisage deals with for the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles, where the company says it has picked thousand of individuals seeking multiple licenses under different names.

``We suspect there must have been human or software errors in how our system was interfaced with the test,'' said James Ebzery, senior vice president for sales and marketing for Viisage. While Viisage scrambles to explain its views to customers and chase down any potential problems in the test, it is taking comfort in the tendency of big companies and government agencies to perform their own testing on their own data before selecting Viisage or one of its rivals.

The government's benchmarking was performed last summer but the results were not fully tabulated and analyzed until recently. The report singled out a finding that in ``reasonable controlled indoor lighting,'' the best facial recognition systems can correctly verify that a person in a photograph or video image is the same person whose picture is stored in a database 90 percent of the time. In addition, only one subject in 100 is falsely linked to an image in the data base in the top systems.

The report also noted that performance has been enhanced by improving technology to rotate images taken at an angle so that the facial recognition software can be applied to a representation of a frontal view.

The data examined whether facial recognition systems could help with the so-called watch list challenge, which involves determining if the person photographed is on a list of individuals who are wanted for some reason and then identifying who they are. Cognitec, the leading performer on that test, gained a 77 percent rating but its success rate fell to 56 percent when the watch list grew to 3,000.

acial recognition technology has improved substantially since 2000, according to results released yesterday of a benchmark test by four federal government agencies involving systems from 10 companies.

The data, which is the latest in a series of biannual tests overseen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is expected to encourage government security officers to deploy facial recognition systems in combination with fingerprinting and other biometric systems for applications like verifying that people are who they claim to be and identifying unknown people by comparing them with a database of images.

But the report also highlighted continuing shortcomings, like the poor performance of recognition systems in outdoors settings in which even the best systems made correct matches to the database of images just 50 percent of the time. And it cited outcomes that it said needed more research, like the tendency of the systems to identify men better than women and older subjects better than young ones.

The report was strictly a technical evaluation and did not discuss any of the privacy or civil rights concerns that have stirred opposition to the technology.